Eyetracking and research have studied how people look at websites. Here are 10 useful findings you can use.

1. Top left corner gets the attention first

When users land on your site, their eye path starts from the upper left corner, and moves on from there. According to this eyetracking study these areas get the most attention:

Similar findings came from a study by Yahoo. Check your site and see what you have in these zones. Move the value proposition to the top left zone. Yes, there can be exceptions, but use this as a starting point and test from there.

Are you familiar with the Gutenberg diagram? It describes a general pattern the eyes move through when looking at (usually text-heavy) content. It fits this zoning conclusion pretty well, with the exception of the bottom right area.

4. People won’t look past the first search results

If you’re not in the top 2 or 3 in Google for a keyword, you’re losing out. In an eyetracking study by Google most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.

If you have a vertical menu, put it on the left. Navigation placed at the top of a homepage however performs best (seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration).

7. Use high quality, large images

Use large, crisp images – recommends usability guru Jakob Nielsen based on his eyetracking studies. Image quality is a significant factor in drawing attention. People in pictures facing forward is more inviting and approachable.

Fuzzy, small images are less inviting as are big glamor shots. Nielsen said the eye-tracking study also surfaced a counter-intuitive finding–people who look like models are less likely to draw attention than ‘normal’ people.

“A call center ad with model in it on the phone may be a good picture technically, but it will more likely be ignored,” Nielsen said. Images appearing unneeded, at least peripherally, will be tuned out. Avoid cheesy stock photos.

8. Need to show pictures of smartphones? Stick with Apple products

A study by EyeTrackshop that recorded consumers looking at groups of smartphones and tablets discovered that Apple’s iPhone 4S and iPad 2 drew more glances and held people’s attention longer than Google Android devices from Amazon, HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

When you list a bunch of headlines on a page, most often it’s the left sides of the headlines that get the attention. People typically scan down a list of headlines, and often don’t view entire headlines. If the first words engage them, they seem likely to read on.

On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention. This means that the first couple of words of the headline need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to draw attention.

10. First impressions take less than a second

When viewing a website, it takes users less than two-tenths of a second to form a first impression, according to an eye-tracking research conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Researchers found that their subjects spent about 2.6 seconds scanning a website before focusing on a particular section. They spent an average of 180 milliseconds focusing, or “fixating,” on one particular section before moving on.

The website sections that drew the most interest from viewers were as follows:

The institution’s logo. Users spent about 6.48 seconds focused on this area before moving on.

The main navigation menu. Almost as popular as the logo, subjects spent an average of 6.44 seconds viewing the menu.

The search box, where users focused for just over 6 seconds.

Social networking links to sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Users spent about 5.95 seconds viewing these areas.

The site’s main image, where users’ eyes fixated for an average of 5.94 seconds.

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Peep Laja

Peep Laja is an entrepreneur and conversion optimization expert. He's been doing digital marketing for 10+ years in Europe, Middle East, Central America and the US. He has extensive experience across verticals: in the past he’s run a software company in Europe, an SEO agency in Panama, real estate portal in Dubai and worked for an international non-profit.
Today he runs a conversion optimization agency Markitekt.

Bravo . . . good piece. I was presenting most of these concepts in my national seminars for graphic design and web design from 1988 through 1995 for Dynamic Graphics . . . the reader eye-flow is the most important, and I’ve since performed design critiques to hundreds of web owners sites that violate the concepts, but don’t understand they did it, and don’t understand why they should have done it. Web designers aren’t necessarily designers. It’s just a name that’s been tagged onto the term.

Could you clarify #10: “They spent an average of 180 milliseconds focusing, or ‘fixating,’ on one particular section before moving on”, but then states that about 6 seconds is spent on the logo (that seems very long) and in that neighborhood for many of the other bullet points.